A couple of years ago I was playing in a buddy’s poker tournament and he asked me and another guy named JB to help collect money and dole out chips.  My buddy had a system that he used to make sure he’d gotten all the money from every player, but JB and I quickly screwed it up and before you knew it we were short a bunch of money.  So we had 30+ guys who all claimed to have payed in their $100 and we were about $500 short.  I was so upset I’d been part of the screw up that I was ready to puke.  Eventually my buddy asked JB why he had bills in the pocket of his shirt and JB realized he’d put some bills in there when his hands got full and then forgotten about it.  Thankfully most of us had played together long enough to know it was an honest mistake but JB still turned red as an apple in his embarassment.

Well, it looks like JB and I are in good company in terms of screwing up the whole money/chip thing.  According to this story in Freakonomics the guys at the World Series of Poker ended up with $2 million in extra chips at the end of the tournament.  Normally you’d think that someone had to be cheating but it ends up that the extra chips were due to some of the WSOP employees being a little math challenged.  I can only imagine how embarassed the WSOP folks are about this.